“Ah, git away with your advisin',” replied Murty. “Billy knows the horse—an' where'd a shlip of a boy be if Shannon cleared out with him? I'd rather carry too much weight, an' know I'd put a man up as could hold the horse.” His anxious eye fell on the girls. “Miss Norah and Miss Tommy!—come here an' wish him luck without offerin' me any advice, or I'll lose me life over the ould race! They have desthroyed me with all the things they're afther tellin' me to do.”
“We won't tell you a thing, Murty—except that he's looking splendid,” Norah said, stroking Shannon's nose, to which the horse responded by nuzzling round her pocket in search of an apple. “No, I can't give you one, old man—I wouldn't dare. But you shall have one after the race, whether you win or not, can't he, Murty?”
“He can so,” said Murty. “Wance he's gone round that thrack he can live on the fat of the land—an' Billy, too. It's a dale aisier to get the condition off a horse than off Billy. No man on this earth 'ud make a black fellow see why he shouldn't have a good blow-out whenever it came his way. Only that Providence made him skinny by nature, he'd be fat as a porpoise this day. I've been watchin' over his meals like a mother with a delicate baby these three weeks back; but what hope 'ud I have with Christmas comin' in the way? He got away on me at Christmas dinner, an' what he didn't ate in the way of turkey an puddin' wouldn't be worth mentioning—an' him booked to ride to-day! 'Plenty' always did be his motter, an' he lives up to it. So he's pounds overweight, an' no help for it.”
“Never mind, Murty,” Jim said. “He knows the horse, and Shannon's able to stand a few pounds extra. He'll give us a good run.”
“I believe ye, Masther Jim,” said Murty, beaming. “He'll not disgrace us, an' if he don't win itself, then he'll not be far behind. There you are, Billy—that's the bell for weighin'. Hurry up now, and get over to the scales.”
The black boy's lean figure, saddle and bridle on arm, threaded its way through the crowd round the weighing enclosure—a little space fenced off by barbed wire. Presently they saw him coming back grinning.
“That pfeller sayin' I plenty too much pounds,” he said in an unusual burst of eloquence.
“Ah, don't be rubbin' it in—don't I know it?” quoth Murty, taking the saddle and slipping it deftly on Shannon's back. “I dunno, did he think he was givin' me a pleasant surprise with the information by way of a New Year's gift. Does he think we've never a scales on Billabong, did ye ask him? There now, he's ready. Get on him, Billy, an' shove out into the track for a canter. I'll get nothing but chat from every one as long as you're here. Take him for a look at some of the hurdles, the way he'll know all about them when he comes to jump.” He stood with a frown on his good-humoured face as Shannon and his rider made off.
Norah laid a hand on his arm.
“There's not a horse on the course better turned out, Murty,” she said. “No one can say the Billabong representative doesn't look fit.”